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The Vancouver Aquarium is bidding to operate Europe’s largest aquarium.

Called L’Oceanogràfic, the aquarium is in Valencia on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. The Vancouver Aquarium is a part of a team that includes KET, a small Spanish company made up of management officials who oversaw the construction and early operation of L’Oceanogràfic, and Omnium Iberico SA, a subsidiary of Aguas de Valencia, which provides water and other municipal services to Valencia and other Spanish jurisdictions.

Teams from Italy and France are also in the running to operate the Valencia aquarium. The winning team is expected to be named late this month or early in April, said John Nightingale, president and CEO of the Vancouver Aquarium.

Nightingale said he’s taken the unusual step of speaking out about the proposal before a final decision has been announced because one of the other teams has already talked to the media in Spain.

“We’re one of three teams,” Nightingale said in an interview at the Vancouver Aquarium. “We haven’t won the right to do anything yet.”

Nightingale said the terms of the government proposal call prohibit him from talking specifics about how much money is involved. If approved, the deal would be in effect for 15 years with an option for a 15-year renewal, he said.

The Vancouver Aquarium would benefit financially by transferring existing programs to Valencia.

“Over the term of the 15 years, some financial revenue should come back to Vancouver Aquarium,” he said. “That will help us grow our programs.

“The goal is to generate more revenue to be able to do more conservation work, more education. We’re very much a business — a non-profit business.”

A group of people from Valencia came to the Vancouver Aquarium with the proposal “out of the blue” in July, 2012, Nightingale said. They chose the aquarium, he said, because of its “international reputation and leadership in public programming and animal care.”

The building that houses L’Oceanogràfic was designed by architect Félix Candela to resemble a water lily. It is located in The City of Arts and Sciences, which is Valencia’s entertainment and cultural district.

L’Oceanogràfic has about 42 million litres of water and about 1.3 million visitors a year; the Vancouver Aquarium has about 9.5 million litres of water and more than one million visitors a year.

The Vancouver Aquarium decided to become part of the bid because it believes that by doing so it will help implement its mission of conserving the natural world, Nightingale said.

“We will transfer our philosophy and our programs around education, conservation and research to L’Oceanogràfic,” he said.

“The teams have agreed to use Vancouver Aquarium’s principles around animal care. We know that we take better care of our animals than most aquariums in the world.”

Whales and Dolphins Conservation describes L’Oceanogràfic as “one of the larger, more modern aquariums in Spain.” The international charity dedicated to saving cetaceans said that L’Oceanogràfic has 13 bottlenose dolphins, 10 of which were caught in the wild. As well, it has a pair of Beluga whales caught in Russian waters.

In 1996, the Vancouver Aquarium announced it would no longer catch cetaceans from the wild. The aquarium now has two Belugas, one of which was caught in the wild before the 1996 announcement; the second is her daughter. As well, the aquarium has two Pacific white-sided dolphins it rescued from the wild.

In an email response, Nightingale said if the aquarium’s bid is approved, the aquarium would apply its “best practices to animal care, which would include our philosophies such as our commitment to no wild capture of whales and dolphins.”

The aquarium has helped run another aquarium before, Nightingale said. The Vancouver Aquarium oversaw the development and first three years of the Shark Reef, an aquarium that opened in Las Vegas in 2000. As well, the aquarium is working with other museums around the world, including the Beijing Aquarium, which is looking to improve its public engagement.

Asked if marketing its program and management expertise would be a model to generate income for the future for the aquarium, Nightingale said: “If we’re selected, we need to understand how it impacts us here and then we’ll see.”

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Vancouver Aquarium in bidding to operate Spanish facility

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